Part 2 of 3: illuminating the world’s largest collection of America’s master luminist Fitz Henry Lane

In part 2 of touring the Cape Ann Museum, Director Ronda Faloon shares some of the NEW as we follow along with her. GET READY TO SEE THINGS YOU’VE NEVER SEEN BEFORE.

The Cape Ann Museum’s focus on art and artists is everywhere.

The dramatically redesigned welcome area and exhibition galleries enhance access and connections. There are new windows bringing the outside in. New amenities (welcome desk! coat room! lockers! bathroom!) on the ground floor orient and encourage us to get ready to take a breath, stop and look.

Hundreds of legacy pottery shards with transferred text from the museum’s archivesare tucked along four new walls in Diane KW’s new installation, At World’s End- The Story of a Shipwreck.

When the Cape Ann Museum re-opens in August, the world’s largest repository of Gloucester’s very own Fitz Henry Lane collection will be 10x brighter thanks to new installation and lighting design. There’s more to Lane still to be revealed. Thanks to higher resolution images and powerful new media, the museum is producing a state of the art catalogue raissone and research tool, The Complete Works of Fitz Henry Lane, that will glow with close ups, archives, artifacts and stories. Nothing though can take the place of standing close and viewing these beauties in person. As Joey insists, “You have to come see these!”

It’s a GMG mission to make sure everyone understands how amazing this museum is and how fortunate it’s here in Gloucester.

With a world class collection and legacy, its ongoing support of contemporary arts, and robust exhibition schedule the Cape Ann Museum has no problem keeping the experience of art alive and present, and compelling.

It’s where you can come experience something that is not part of everyday life.

Ronda Faloon, Director of the Cape Ann Museum, discusses the museum’s transformation over the past 10 months and gives GMG exclusive access leading up to the grand re-opening. Getting there required long hours and difficult conditions, a 5 million dollar capital campaign and a ten month closure. This stellar collection is shown in even better conditions.

There will be a week of celebratory and special events beginning with the kick-off gala of August 16, 2014, and open to the public Tuesday August 19th. Visit www.capeannmuseum.org for all the details, and sign up for progress updates.

This is the first documentary ever made about world-renowned painter Marsden Hartley. It was written, directed, and narrated by Michael Maglaras of 217 Films, who will be on hand to introduce the film and answer questions following the screening.

“Visible Silence” features 43 Hartley paintings and sketches as well as many photographs of Hartley — from early youth to his final years as “Maine’s Painter.” Drawing heavily from his poetical works, this documentary, a deeply personal statement by Maglaras, captures the essence of Hartley — long considered one of the fathers of American Modernism.

Hartley spent his life traveling the world in search of remote and forbidding landscapes. A critical period for Hartley was his stay in Gloucester in the 1930’s, where he painted his “Dogtown” series.

“The two periods in Hartley’s creative life, first in 1920 and then again in 1931 when he went to Gloucester and to Cape Ann to paint, left us some of the most wonderful and exciting work of Hartley’s career,” said Maglaras. “Hartley fell in love with the area around Gloucester, known as Dogtown, and from his humble boarding house at #1 Eastern Point Road, reported to friends that ‘… a sense of eeriness pervades all the place; the white ghosts of those huge boulders stand like sentinels guarding nothing but space.’”

An entire section of this film is devoted to an important early painting, “Carnival of Autumn,” which is in the permanent collection of the Boston Museum of Fine Art. Also featured is the late painting “Summer, Sea, Window, Red Curtain” from the Addison Gallery of American Art in Andover, Mass.

In 2008, a Hartley painting sold for $6.31 million, setting an auction record at Christie’s for an American Modernist work, overtaking a record previously held by a work of Georgia O’Keeffe.

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As long as supplies last if any GMG folks want a bumper sticker but can't drop down the dock, just send a self addressed and stamped envelope longer then 7 and a half inches and I'll drop one in the mail for you.

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Free GMG Gloucester Sticker

As long as supplies last if any GMG folks want a bumper sticker but can't drop down the dock, just send a self addressed and stamped envelope longer then 7 and a half inches and I'll drop one in the mail for you.

Send the self addressed and stamped envelope to the dock at 95 East Main St Gloucester Ma 01930 care of Joey (put my name in big letters to make sure it gets to me)